Small, mass-produced reactors could be the future, but only if they get cheaper.

Today, every nuclear power plant is unique, custom-built and run by site-specifically trained employees. This makes reactor construction expensive and, some argue, less safe because repairs require custom parts and one-off solutions. In recent years, nuclear energy advocates have been promoting an alternative—smaller, modular reactors that could be mass-produced. These cheaper, smaller, and standardized units could be a power solution for industries and municipalities that are looking to lower their carbon dioxide footprint.

But a paper by Ahmed Abdulla, Inês Lima Azevedo, and M. Granger Morgan finds that the small module reactor solution may not actually be cost effective yet.

The small modular designs have several advantages over traditional nuclear plants. Average construction time for a small module reactor should be about three years, compared to five for a traditional reactor. The new designs also have potential to be sited in places where a traditional nuclear reactor could not be located.

Several American companies are actively developing this technology, but without a sample of active small reactors to study, there was no hard economic data for the researchers to use. Instead, the researchers careful quantified the average opinions of industry experts. The researchers presented 16 experts with a variety of installation scenarios and asked them to estimate the cost per kilowatt of reactor capability and the time required for construction.

As you might expect, opinions varied widely. Although the experts remain anonymous, most work for companies developing smaller reactor technology. The median cost estimates for a kilowatt of electricity produced by a single 45 MWe reactor ranged from $4,000 to $16,000. For comparison, the cost estimates for 1000-MWe large light water reactor ranged from $2,600 to $6,600.

One problem is that as a reactor shrinks, it loses the economy of scale for key components like the pressure vessel that holds the coolant and the reactor core. Five of the 16 experts “argued that costs rise rapidly as reactors become smaller, with the result that the 45-MWe reactor is especially disadvantaged,” Abdulla et al wrote.

Another problem is that current law prohibits more than two reactors from being operated from the same control room, making it illegal to site lots of the small modular reactors together. However, most of the experts believed that, if legal, installing a series of the small reactors could increase economies of scale and reduce costs.

The experts agreed that the main advantage to a small module reactor is the standardized factory production, which would certainly be cheaper than custom components. However, a majority of those interviewed “were skeptical that such economies would completely offset the diseconomies of scale in reactor size,” Abdulla et al. wrote.

While this study shows significant uncertainty about the competitiveness of small module reactors in today’s energy economy, the experts certainly aren’t ready to rule them out. As pilot projects come online, better data will be available. Designs will undoubtedly become more efficient. And if reducing carbon dioxide emissions becomes more of a priority, the economy might become more favorable to nuclear power. If that happens, small module reactors could be a solution.

Promoted Comments

I am working in the nuclear industry, as some may know here. Usually I keep away from threads like this, because it is too much work to dispell all of the misconceptions and even outright lies.

First things first: I am personally very skeptical of "small nuclear".

The main reason for this is licensing burden. And by licesning burden I am not meaning the design, actions and components necessary for ensuring safety. By licensing burden I am meaning the burden on prooving sufficent quality.This is the main cost driver. A safety class one pump will cost somewhere of the order of $5 million. Perhaps $10 million. $4.8 million of that is purely due to the necessary paper work to get a fully traceable ASME N-stamp on everything. Once the pump is installed, there will be three to four binders full of ASME quality control sheets, just for this single pump. Making this pump smaller or larger will not appreciably affect the volume of qualification tests, witness documentation points and personal certificates.

The main benefit from assembling everything in a single factory is that some of the ASME quality control documentation can be reused for multiple parts. Also, a proof of quality is much easier to do in a clean factory environment under controlled conditions than out in the middle of no-where of a nuclear coonstruction site.

What matters for cost is the pure component count, weld count, civil structures count. And most of this is relatively fixed due to physics and the need to handle single faults, common mode faults and risk reduction goals.

Now, small reactors have the benefit of slower accident progression due to decay heat (the ratio of decay heat input versus internal water volumes is much better), so the designs can be even more passive than the AP1000. That is good, since that will reduce components again. But, the main problem remains: Proof of quality costs, and these costs do not scale with size.

What actually needs to happen is a complete realignment of the focus on nuclear safety. The current thinking is that quality = safety.

This is demonstrably worng. All significant nuclear accidents and near-misses were due to faulty design. They would have happened no matter the amount of paperwork prooving quality behind it!

3656 posts | registered Jan 18, 2001

Kate Prengaman
Kate is a science and environmental reporter living in Yakima, Washington. She writes about everything from emerging energy technology to persistent environmental problems and she really likes plants. Emailkate.arsT@gmail.com//Twitter@kprengaman

280 Reader Comments

It occurs to me that a good example of small nuclear reactors are with the US Navy. Nimitz class carriers carry two nuclear reactors rated at 550MW each plus another 100MW from steam generation. I know the cooling systems are radically different from a land based facility, but a lot of the miniaturization of the reactor must already be in place. They have been in service for decades now and I am sure there are some relevant lessons to be learned there.

Then there are nuclear powered submarines with even tighter space requirements.

And there I think would be the rub: Top Secret (or whatever) schematics and designs would have to be handed over to someone else outside of the DoD/DoE thus allowing for working knowledge of military power plant designs and technologies. I am not saying it will never be released, but I don't see it being released before something much more advanced is developed.

Personally, I am neither a fan of nuclear power nor against it. What I am against is much of the profit-seeking corporations that would run it and the oversight committee/organization that gets complacent.

It occurs to me that a good example of small nuclear reactors are with the US Navy. Nimitz class carriers carry two nuclear reactors rated at 550MW each plus another 100MW from steam generation. I know the cooling systems are radically different from a land based facility, but a lot of the miniaturization of the reactor must already be in place. They have been in service for decades now and I am sure there are some relevant lessons to be learned there.

Then there are nuclear powered submarines with even tighter space requirements.

And there I think would be the rub: Top Secret (or whatever) schematics and designs would have to be handed over to someone else outside of the DoD/DoE thus allowing for working knowledge of military power plant designs and technologies. I am not saying it will never be released, but I don't see it being released before something much more advanced is developed.

Personally, I am neither a fan of nuclear power nor against it. What I am against is much of the profit-seeking corporations that would run it and the oversight committee/organization that gets complacent.

Here's the real rub. Those reactors may be small, but how cheap are they? How much maintenance do they require? How safe are they?

The current generation of aircraft carriers cost something like $10 billion each. I find it unlikely that buried in that budget is a cost-efficient nuclear reactor.

From wikipedia "Due to historic activities typically related to radium industry, uranium mining, and military programs, there are numerous sites that contain or are contaminated with radioactivity. In the United States alone, the Department of Energy states there are "millions of gallons of radioactive waste" as well as "thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel and material" and also "huge quantities of contaminated soil and water."[The Fernald, Ohio site for example had "31 million pounds of uranium product", "2.5 billion pounds of waste", "2.75 million cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris", and a "223 acre portion of the underlying Great Miami Aquifer had uranium levels above drinking standards."[16] The United States has at least 108 sites designated as areas that are contaminated and unusable, sometimes many thousands of acres.[16][17" Its not that I don't trust technology, its that I don't trust PEOPLE. Until fossil fuel and nuclear have to pay for their externalities I don't think the playing field is level. The other issue I have is regarding centralization. Wind and solar by their nature are decentralized, making it much harder for the evil amongst us to kill our power supply. So if the makers of new nuclear power plants have to post a bond to cover the cost of a massive failure as well as dealing with all the waste then I would say go for it.

If this or any of the other myriad of technologies that will solve the world's problems works out, we can tear down the nuclear plants and build (wind | wave | water | solar | tide | concrete | algae | space laser) plants on the rubble, like we should be doing with the coal plants today.

Money which would not be wasted, even at $9 billion each. At least they will produce reliable low-carbon electricity for many decades to come. Still, the actual cost is closer to $2 billion in sane places, where they are not are held up by endless lawsuits and regulatory nonsense.

Either way, it would have been far more productive investing some of that in molten salt reactors and fusion machines not of the doughnut variety. That is to say, technologies which actually have significant untapped potential, and are clearly capable of displacing fossil fuels. Fusion is further off, but fission is well understood, proven, and viable today.

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"Short time" is clearly relative with timespans of over a decade - for the planes, mind you. And that's commercial. Never mind military.

That was referring to the mass manufacturing of planes, at one a day or so. Once the design and facilities are completed, production proceeds rapidly. Nuclear reactors of a suitable design would be no different, and could displace fossil fuels entirely in a few decades.

What about the nuclear waste? I haven't been in this talk for a while so I assume there is nuclear waste left over that has to be dealt with.

Nuclear waste is mainly because of the terrible design of the older generation of reactors back in the 50s and 60s. Today, we have reactor designs that don't produce waste, and in some cases we have designs that consumes waste to generate power.

The problem is being allowed to construct those new designs and operate them commercially in the US.

What I really think should happen is development of nuclear reactors small enough to put on an electric vehicle and obliterate all range anxiety.

Radio-thermal would work for that. Among the (many) problems with doing so is the enormous cost of the radioactive isotopes you'd need to power a car though. On the plus side, you could probably replace most of the chrome accents with solid gold without increasing the total cost of the vehicle much.

"PRISM is based on technology that was demonstrated in a fast reactor in the U.S. called the EBR II (Experimental Breeder Reactor) that operated successfully for 30 years. Last year, GEH completed the commercialization of PRISM, which utilizes evolutionary sodium cooled technology and employs advanced passive safety design features. GEH’s calculations have shown that PRISM technology can disposition practically all the stored plutonium at Sellafield, offering a potentially attractive solution to the elimination of excess civil plutonium stocks."

I believe one of these will be built as an 'experiental reactor' to dispose of the UK's nuclear waste. this has to be a good business, getting paid to dispose of waste, and getting paid for the by-product electricity. it took some really slick marketing by a GE exec i wish (i could remember the name) testimony before congress to get one of these built in the US>

the problem is that we are using thermal reactors designed originally to produce plutonium for weapons. we start with an enormous amount of uranium, enrich it which means creating an enormous pile of depleted uranium. which we can't think of anything better to do with than to make armor piercing munitions to shoot into iraq. then we burn the fissile parts down producing more nasty parts. fast reactors can be tuned to burn plutonuim or the really nasty long lived isotopes or make more fissionable products from depleted uranium.

the good news is that all that nuclear waste we have been accumulating for the past 50 years can power all the worlds energy needs for the foreseeable future, and we will be running these 1960s reactors for a while producing more waste^H^H^H^H free fuel.

The US was developing fast reactors from the beginning but our brilliant politicians shut down the program somewhere around 1994. shortly after all the program demonstrated passive stability. shutdown all the cooling systems, and guess what. ... you never heard anything about it? ... (google EBR II)

Short of a miracle, renewable energy is not gonna do it, not even close. Any effort we have put into them so far has resulted in bugger all result so far, our emissions are only rising and will continue to do so for a while.

I don't think that is true. All the research I've seen into solar/hydro/wind suggest they are good solutions short term and long term.

The problem is building a new source of energy is more expensive than continuing to use the one we have already built. And we would have to fire almost everyone working in the energy industry right now because their qualifications amd experience would be almost useless, and the massive corporations who are highly profitable now might not be highly profitable after pivoting to a completely different energy source.

Dunno about the rest of the world, but where I live any polititian who tries to take affirmitive action towards solving climate change is quickly voted out or put under enough pressure to backpeddle. Local government, state government, federal government... this problem exists at every level.

The real problem with wind and solar is the same - no effective way to store excess power generated in quantities sufficient to take up the slack when those sources aren't generating much. With hydro the problem is that all the useful places you can build a hydro plant already have a hydro plant because it was such a great place to build one.

Arguing against new nuclear technology is actively harmful and quite frankly, it angers me because politics and the "green" movement has already done enough damage to nuclear progress and humanity's future as it is.

The AGW people kill me with this. They're all "Science Science Science!" And I'm "Ok, ok, I get it. Hey, we can go a long way fighting GW with all see nifty new nuclear designs." You can almost feel breeze as the anti-science shields clamp down over their minds.

Sorry, kids, you don't get to pick and choose which science. That's ideology, and it makes you just as bad as the climate deniers, the creationists and the anti vaxxers.

From wikipedia "Due to historic activities typically related to radium industry, uranium mining, and military programs, there are numerous sites that contain or are contaminated with radioactivity. In the United States alone, the Department of Energy states there are "millions of gallons of radioactive waste" as well as "thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel and material" and also "huge quantities of contaminated soil and water."[The Fernald, Ohio site for example had "31 million pounds of uranium product", "2.5 billion pounds of waste", "2.75 million cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris", and a "223 acre portion of the underlying Great Miami Aquifer had uranium levels above drinking standards."[16] The United States has at least 108 sites designated as areas that are contaminated and unusable, sometimes many thousands of acres.[16][17" Its not that I don't trust technology, its that I don't trust PEOPLE. Until fossil fuel and nuclear have to pay for their externalities I don't think the playing field is level. The other issue I have is regarding centralization. Wind and solar by their nature are decentralized, making it much harder for the evil amongst us to kill our power supply. So if the makers of new nuclear power plants have to post a bond to cover the cost of a massive failure as well as dealing with all the waste then I would say go for it.

Indeed, what people fail to realize is just how incredibly dirty processes like mining, enriching, and reprocessing are. You end up with lots of really fun contamination. Its all great to say that "there's only 60k tons of nuclear waste in the US" but that's a ridiculous and deceptive number because a lot of it is mixed with millions of tons of other material, and separating it is NOT EASY. Much of this material is in the form of nasty caustic liquid solutions and such too.

The scary part is, the US is GOOD. The Soviets simply dumped billions of curies of waste into rivers, pits, burned it, etc. Nobody knows where the majority of what they produced actually ended up. Lots of it is mostly likely in the Arctic Ocean somewhere. I had a long talk with some people who were given the job of studying this little question, and what I heard was VERY VERY scary.

Nuclear power has always seemed to have more promise than has panned out, but the problem is that when it comes down to the details of actually building and running a real plant in the real world things just aren't ideal, and all these designs that are theoretically so wonderful, well they're allways less safe, more costly, and etc. It is not only not clear that small scale reactors will be economical, it isn't clear that ANY of the 4G reactors will be that huge an improvement over existing ones when actually put in service in the hands of cost-cutting managers and operators who have been dulled by decades of routine operation when the flood/earthquake/freak accident comes around.

The other issue is TIME. Even in the best cases it takes a decade to build an start an AP1000 or something similar, and more advanced designs are 3-4 decades at least from going online. Say what you like about renewables, but they're going online now and they get more cost-effective all the time. Wind is CHEAP, and despite all the myths about being "non-baseload" you damned well can guarantee enough power if you build a good number of turbines in enough locations and the interconnects are not as expensive as myth seems to make them.

Its not a perfect system, but there is a serious question as to whether its worth sinking a lot more money into nuclear vs improved energy efficiency and renewable power. The US has actually done a mediocre job there and still improved its energy intensity numbers substantially. With a really comprehensive approach Its really well worth questioning if we need more than perhaps a modest investment in building existing 4G designs.

..can consume waste from current reactor tech...uses a material that is MUCH more common in the earths crust (eastern Idaho has huge deposits of thorium, enough for centuries, and there are similar deposits over the globe)...operates at close to normal atmospheric pressures, so no huge containment vessels (water cooled plants run at 50 to 70 atmospheres)...self-safe. Lose of all power and thorium salts automatically drain into a heatsinked holding tank.

So when someone says 'Nuclear energy is bad/dangerous', they're making a blanket statement that doesn't apply to all methods of energy generation by nuclear means.

I am working in the nuclear industry, as some may know here. Usually I keep away from threads like this, because it is too much work to dispell all of the misconceptions and even outright lies.

First things first: I am personally very skeptical of "small nuclear".

The main reason for this is licensing burden. And by licesning burden I am not meaning the design, actions and components necessary for ensuring safety. By licensing burden I am meaning the burden on prooving sufficent quality.This is the main cost driver. A safety class one pump will cost somewhere of the order of $5 million. Perhaps $10 million. $4.8 million of that is purely due to the necessary paper work to get a fully traceable ASME N-stamp on everything. Once the pump is installed, there will be three to four binders full of ASME quality control sheets, just for this single pump. Making this pump smaller or larger will not appreciably affect the volume of qualification tests, witness documentation points and personal certificates.

The main benefit from assembling everything in a single factory is that some of the ASME quality control documentation can be reused for multiple parts. Also, a proof of quality is much easier to do in a clean factory environment under controlled conditions than out in the middle of no-where of a nuclear coonstruction site.

What matters for cost is the pure component count, weld count, civil structures count. And most of this is relatively fixed due to physics and the need to handle single faults, common mode faults and risk reduction goals.

Now, small reactors have the benefit of slower accident progression due to decay heat (the ratio of decay heat input versus internal water volumes is much better), so the designs can be even more passive than the AP1000. That is good, since that will reduce components again. But, the main problem remains: Proof of quality costs, and these costs do not scale with size.

What actually needs to happen is a complete realignment of the focus on nuclear safety. The current thinking is that quality = safety.

This is demonstrably worng. All significant nuclear accidents and near-misses were due to faulty design. They would have happened no matter the amount of paperwork prooving quality behind it!

Indeed, what people fail to realize is just how incredibly dirty processes like mining, enriching, and reprocessing are. You end up with lots of really fun contamination. Its all great to say that "there's only 60k tons of nuclear waste in the US" but that's a ridiculous and deceptive number because a lot of it is mixed with millions of tons of other material, and separating it is NOT EASY. Much of this material is in the form of nasty caustic liquid solutions and such too.

Uranium mining accounts for about 0.1% of all mining, and conventional reactors only burn about 0.4% of mined uranium. Used efficiently, the actual fuel requirements are minuscule, and could probably be satisfied by the tailings of rare earth mining alone. Enrichment is no longer necessary after moving to the thorium cycle, and processing fluid fuels is far less challenging.

The bulk of the mess is the result of the weapons program, hastily pursued during wartime when environmental concerns weren't exactly high priority. Spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors is not only perfectly manageable, but constitutes a massive and highly concentrated energy resource. No one would complain about millions of barrels of oil sitting around, yet somehow people are eager to destroy the spent fuel which is actually about 97% unspent. It is criminally stupid to even contemplate discarding it.

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Nuclear power has always seemed to have more promise than has panned out, but the problem is that when it comes down to the details of actually building and running a real plant in the real world things just aren't ideal, and all these designs that are theoretically so wonderful, well they're allways less safe, more costly, and etc. It is not only not clear that small scale reactors will be economical, it isn't clear that ANY of the 4G reactors will be that huge an improvement over existing ones when actually put in service in the hands of cost-cutting managers and operators who have been dulled by decades of routine operation when the flood/earthquake/freak accident comes around.

No, the problem is that there has been little development for over 50 years, and people judge nuclear based on a ridiculously primitive incarnation of the technology. Far superior technologies existed even back then, yet politicians sent us down the wrong path, against the better judgment of the leading scientists. So today we are stuck with relics derived from submarine reactors and meltdowns. The promise is still there, and molten salt reactors will deliver.

Quote:

The other issue is TIME. Even in the best cases it takes a decade to build an start an AP1000 or something similar, and more advanced designs are 3-4 decades at least from going online. Say what you like about renewables, but they're going online now and they get more cost-effective all the time. Wind is CHEAP, and despite all the myths about being "non-baseload" you damned well can guarantee enough power if you build a good number of turbines in enough locations and the interconnects are not as expensive as myth seems to make them.

Yes, time is an issue. Building millions of windmills and solar panels, and the requisite transmission infrastructure and storage is not only prohibitively expensive, but will take too long. It doesn't take a decade to build an AP1000, nor 3-4 decades to develop a new reactor. That is entirely the fault of the totally dysfunctional NRC.

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Its not a perfect system, but there is a serious question as to whether its worth sinking a lot more money into nuclear vs improved energy efficiency and renewable power. The US has actually done a mediocre job there and still improved its energy intensity numbers substantially. With a really comprehensive approach Its really well worth questioning if we need more than perhaps a modest investment in building existing 4G designs.

Really, there is no question; one only needs to compare Germany and France. The remaining problem is to make nuclear cheap enough that the developing world chooses it over coal. Molten salt reactor technology makes that possible.

Hydroelectric and solar produce metric fucktons of power. The problem is they require further effort and research to fully harness.

All this "the only answer is nuclear" stuff is laughable. It's like you work in the nuclear industry.

Except we've not got renewables to work at the levels of economic efficiency required to supply power at the base load level. They work in some locations, but not universally.

The main issue is grid level storage. Yes, solar can meet the demands of peak power, and an individual house can have sufficient storage to see them through the next dark period* and the cost is almost at parity with the subsidised** coal industry. But the storage doesn't scale, and gets worse

Now, I agree with your comment earlier that renewables have been getting a raw deal under the research funding allocations, but that doesn't escape that nuclear has been already researched, and the problems with implementing them are engineering™ and bureaucratic™. While renewables have been researched, it seems grid level storage hasn't, small ventures excluded.

This leaves renewables in an uncomfortable situation. The most promising designs seem to be hydro-power hybrids.*** Admittedly I'm a fan of Donald Sadoway, but he isn't there yet, imho.∆

Today, after looking around I keep concluding nuclear is the way forward but to increase dramatically the research into renewables and battery storage. This dichotomy over which power generation system is to be built really needs to die. We need and want all of them (including coal! Just not at the levels we are heading too today.)

Right. The estimated cost of the nuclear industry's proposed building boom is more than the total amount of money sunk into renewable research in 2010. Never mind the increasing efficiency in renewable and we have been using hydroelectric for god damn ever where available.Nuclear is the technology that has gotten alot of money and a lot of attention and hasn't paid jack.

Hydroelectric and solar produce metric fucktons of power. The problem is they require further effort and research to fully harness.

As linked, quite a few countries get 30-50% of their power from nuclear. That's hardly "hasn't paid jack".

The problem with the "just research and then go renewable" argument is it assumes renewable power sources will achieve whatever number makes them able to provide the world's power. They may, or they may not. If they do, it may take five years or five hundred years. Sure, research away, but don't assume it's the answer to all our energy problems without proof.

In the short term though, if we need more power, we have a choice between the options that are feasible now. Given the options feasible now, nuclear produces the least environmental impact.

Reneable energy is feasible now. Germanys total energy export have risen in the last few year. Even after switching off several nuclear power plant and mainly because of its greatly expanded usage ofwind, solar etc. BTW most of this power is exportet to countrys like France with a way bigger percentageof nuclear power usage.

What about the nuclear waste? I haven't been in this talk for a while so I assume there is nuclear waste left over that has to be dealt with.

Once you start reprocessing the amount of waste becomes trivial. The issue is that is has to be stored for a astronomically long time. I don't think the technology is mature at all. This issue could hypothetically be addressed. A lot more research is needed.

Nope. France is doing it, has been for decades. (Also: UK, Russia, India, and Japan.) We have the technology, we choose not to use it.

What about the nuclear waste? I haven't been in this talk for a while so I assume there is nuclear waste left over that has to be dealt with.

Once you start reprocessing the amount of waste becomes trivial. The issue is that is has to be stored for a astronomically long time. I don't think the technology is mature at all. This issue could hypothetically be addressed. A lot more research is needed.

Nope. France is doing it, has been for decades. (Also: UK, Russia, India, and Japan.) We have the technology, we choose not to use it.

Reprocessing of nuclear fuel only works for a tiny amount of the total generated radioactive wastein a nuclear power plant. Most of it needs to be locked away for a long time.

What do use propose to do with the rest?

Nuclear waste composition:

Remaining fuel: 97%Fission products: 3%

The reason today for burying spent fuel for >10000 years is because of the half-life of Pu-239. But the true waste, the fission products, decay to levels below the original ore after ~300 years.If we remove all the remaining fuel and consume it, we're left with waste that is very manageable.

To be more precise, the amount of the fission products that needs storage are only ~7%, which equals the amount of Sr-90 and Cs-137. The rest of the waste is safe relatively quickly, with 83% having decayed away after 10 years. The last 10% are long-lived isotopes that release so low amounts of radiation that they're not a hazard to human health.

Of the ~65000 metric ton of spent fuel in the US, only 1950 is fission products, with the rest being usable fuel in the right reactor.Of those 1950 metric ton, 136,5 metric ton needs storage for 300 years while most of the rest is way beyond 10 years old and can be partitioned and sold.

What about the nuclear waste? I haven't been in this talk for a while so I assume there is nuclear waste left over that has to be dealt with.

Once you start reprocessing the amount of waste becomes trivial. The issue is that is has to be stored for a astronomically long time. I don't think the technology is mature at all. This issue could hypothetically be addressed. A lot more research is needed.

Nope. France is doing it, has been for decades. (Also: UK, Russia, India, and Japan.) We have the technology, we choose not to use it.

Reprocessing of nuclear fuel only works for a tiny amount of the total generated radioactive wastein a nuclear power plant. Most of it needs to be locked away for a long time.

What do use propose to do with the rest?

Nuclear waste composition:

Remaining fuel: 97%Fission products: 3%

The reason today for burying spent fuel for >10000 years is because of the half-life of Pu-239. But the true waste, the fission products, decay to levels below the original ore after ~300 years.If we remove all the remaining fuel and consume it, we're left with waste that is very manageable.

To be more precise, the amount of the fission products that needs storage are only ~7%, which equals the amount of Sr-90 and Cs-137. The rest of the waste is safe relatively quickly, with 83% having decayed away after 10 years. The last 10% are long-lived isotopes that release so low amounts of radiation that they're not a hazard to human health.

Of the ~65000 metric ton of spent fuel in the US, only 1950 is fission products, with the rest being usable fuel in the right reactor.Of those 1950 metric ton, 136,5 metric ton needs storage for 300 years while most of the rest is way beyond 10 years old and can be partitioned and sold.

Well nice try but beside the point.

Obvouisly the highly enriched and hidiously expensive nuclear fuel itself can be reprocess and afaikno nuclear rod is simply dropped into storage for all those aeons.

However this again is a very small part of the total radiactive waste produces during the operation of a nuclear plant. Almost everything that comes into contact, is put into or close to the nuclear reactor will be irradiated for ages.

GE Hitachi are on the brink of having their Gen IV Small Modular Reactor approved for burning the UK's plutonium stockpile. It's a 'Power Block' of 2 x 311 MWe Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (SFR); this is the most favoured Gen IV reactor for early development.

One of the processing options would render the plutonium useless as a bomb making material in 5 years. The reactor can then use the resulting fuel to generate enough electricity for 750,000 people for another 50 or 60 years.

GE Hitachi are offering the UK Government payment by results, for every unit of plutonium processed and will receive the income from the electricity fed into the National Grid. This smacks of GE Hitachi knowing the exact cost of the modular production of these reactors to the nearest cent per MWh. They say they can produce the first-of-a-kind in 5 years and at about the 17th, the learning curve will flatten out to 36 months.

This reactor will not be anywhere near as expensive as a SMR version of a LWR. Operating at atmospheric pressure, there's no need for thick walled, one-piece, forged reactor vessels, steam generators, pressurisers, valves and pipework. They are inherently safe - shutting down according to the laws of physics, without human intervention, under the worst accident conditions such as loss of all power and/or loss of safety systems.

For the mass of commentators who ponder the problem of nuclear waste, all you need to do is switch your mind-set and start to regard it as the world's most precious energy resource. It is out of the ground and can be burned in breeder reactors as fuel, to produce electricity or process heat.

PRISM can be configured as a breeder reactor and in the UK we have enough of this precious energy resource to provide all of our power for 500 years. The USA will be similarly positioned, in terms of energy security for hundreds of years.

The minuscule waste stream produced by breeder reactors decays to background radiation levels in 300 years - easily, cheaply and safely stored.

Gen IV, inherently safe breeder reactors can supply an energy-rich future to every individual on the planet, even when there are 9 or 10 billion of us in 2050. They can do this for all of time (the 5 billion years the Earth has left) from inexhaustible sources of uranium and thorium.

Worldwide deployment of Small Modular Breeder Reactors (SMBRs) is the only technological solution that can keep the world free of wars over energy resources, water and food, in a (greenhouse gas) clean way. The technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally friendly than the resource-hungry technologies of renewable energy.

Arguing against new nuclear technology is actively harmful and quite frankly, it angers me because politics and the "green" movement has already done enough damage to nuclear progress and humanity's future as it is.

The AGW people kill me with this. They're all "Science Science Science!" And I'm "Ok, ok, I get it. Hey, we can go a long way fighting GW with all see nifty new nuclear designs." You can almost feel breeze as the anti-science shields clamp down over their minds.

Sorry, kids, you don't get to pick and choose which science. That's ideology, and it makes you just as bad as the climate deniers, the creationists and the anti vaxxers.

:scratch:

Not sure who you are talking to, I'm certainly all for nuclear [Heh, as long as we get rockets. We need the rockets.] and don't see why nuclear and AGW would be incompatible.

What ever happened to the the discussion around Pebble Bed Reactors, Breeder Reactors & the like? The tech seemed really promising back in ’03-04.

Well. . . they are still very promising. They just haven't really been built and demonstrated.

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Around 2020ish, there hopefully will be licensing approval for a few new types of reactors - some of them SMR versions of basically the same light water reactor tech we use today, but some of them being fast breeder reactors that can "burn-off" the long lived radioactive waste in our current spent nuclear fuel.

Thanks for the detailed response. This is tough stuff. I love the idea of "burning off" current waste as well as the idea of a self-contained reactor that can’t melt down. I’ll keep my fingers crossed we can get there in the next 5-10 years (or at least before we experience another catastrophic event).

GE Hitachi are on the brink of having their Gen IV Small Modular Reactor approved for burning the UK's plutonium stockpile.

LOL what?!

GE Hitachi has not even started pre-application filling talks with the ONR (Office of Nuclear Regulations). And that won't happen as long as there is no sponsor to actually construct one of those in the UK.

I've never noticed the name Kate Prengaman before, but now I do I see she writes a few articles I've enjoyed. This one was like the rest - balanced and accurate. I thought is was pretty good until I read the comments.

Kate, if you want to educate this mob, you have a lot of do.

Here is a few facts for the "mob" to consider:

- Conventional reactors burn about 0.2% of their fuel. All these "small" designs are breeders, they burn 98% of their fuel.

- If we just look at known uranium reserves, if the entire world converted to nuclear they would last a few decades. Less than coal, actually. There maybe other places we can get uranium, just like there maybe better battery technologies. But if you burn 98% rather than 0.2% then a few decades becomes millenniums.

- The waste products from fast breeders are highly radioactive. That means you can't crack open a small reactor to make bombs unless you serious know what you are doing. Double that if you use the optimum coolant - liquid sodium.

- Highly radio active means they have a short 1/2 life. As in measured in centuries rather than millenniums. Keeping waste safe for 10,000 years is a fools errand, but 300 years - that's maybe possible. The USA has been fairly stable over 300 years - only one civil war.

- Nuclear has a problem. It's been around what, 60 years? In that time prices have dropped what, maybe 50%. In the mean time solar has dropped by a factor of 95%, wind by 80%. Nuclear's problem is each experimental design costs billions, literally. And then in 50 years you get your result. Solar, wind batteries well it costs millions at trial each now design, and a year or so to test it. Guess which develops faster? The interesting thing about 100MW nuclear is there by definition a lot more plants needed to do the job, which increases the competition and rate of R&D.

The bottom line are the current nuclear plant designs are dinosaurs. They are slow, unbelievably complex, inefficient and dangerous. Yet, lurking within there is a technology that will give us safe, base load power for more what in human terms is an eternity. We just have to find out how to do it. As far as I can tell, these small plants are the only hope we have of discovering the magic pudding.

[quote="[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=24592773#p24592773]Exactly. People who are against fossil fuels should be supporting nuclear power. I don't know if it's ignorance or simple dishonesty that keeps so many of them from doing so.[/quote]

I was a much more wildly enthusiastic supporter of fission before Enron came along.

I heard that reactors can use Thorium as fuel instead of uranium/plutonium. That would have be important, I'm assuming, since a more decentralized solution would have obvious security concerns about fuel being turned into weapons of some sort.

India is driving most of the thorium development since they have large reserves of it. They don't want their nuclear energy economy reliant on foreign interests.

Today, every nuclear power plant is unique, custom-built and run by site-specifically trained employees

In the US maybe, in France they have a much less idiotic system where every currently operating reactor is one of three versions of the same design, and thus procedures and guidelines can be more or less uniform nationwide.

Either way, it would have been far more productive investing some of that in molten salt reactors and fusion machines not of the doughnut variety.

Yes, fusion reactors. Because renewable energy is an unproductive longshot.

Quote:

That was referring to the mass manufacturing of planes, at one a day or so. Once the design and facilities are completed, production proceeds rapidly. Nuclear reactors of a suitable design would be no different, and could displace fossil fuels entirely in a few decades.

I don't even know where to start explaining how your whole concept here is wrong.

(if people would be willing to accept it, which is mostly an education issue).

Indeed. As focused as people (as a whole) seem to be with the current generation (i.e. unwillingness to conserve now to provide for future generations), I'm surprised so very few people, relatively, are concerned about coal plants in their back yards. You don't see all that many people petitioning as loudly as the anti-nuclear crowd against coal plants (mercury, CO2, etc.) or even natural gas plants (CO2). I guess it's fine if it slowly kills you, it's that rapidly killing stuff that we don't like.

Nuclear is safe as houses by comparison. BTW, before you trot out the various spills that have occurred, reflect on the hundreds of megatons of above ground nuclear detonation between 1945 and the early 60s. Somehow we're all still here...

Reneable energy is feasible now. Germanys total energy export have risen in the last few year. Even after switching off several nuclear power plant and mainly because of its greatly expanded usage ofwind, solar etc. BTW most of this power is exportet to countrys like France with a way bigger percentageof nuclear power usage.

Export isn't the right word. Germany is dumping their excess renewable energy into their neighbors pumped hydro for storage. Meanwhile, they have been considering disconnecting Germany from the grid for the trouble. This isn't a solution that all of Europe can adopt.

Germany is increasing coal consumption and CO2 output. However, legislating that renewable energy gets first priority on the market is producing an interesting problem. Fossil fuel generators must be kept running all the time to fill the gaps in renewable output, yet are not being paid to do so. The economics are already failing, and Germany isn't even close to a successful transition.

Reneable energy is feasible now. Germanys total energy export have risen in the last few year. Even after switching off several nuclear power plant and mainly because of its greatly expanded usage ofwind, solar etc. BTW most of this power is exportet to countrys like France with a way bigger percentageof nuclear power usage.

Mainly because of expanded use of coal actually. Not the relatively high quality and slightly cleaner burning hard/anthracite coal used in the US either, they burn lignite, which is dirty and pollutant spewing even for coal.

The reason France imports coal fired German electricity is because nuclear reactors aren't particularly good at load following and thus momentary demand spikes have to be met by more 'nimble' supply sources. France remains a net electricity exporter, and produces about half the CO2 per capita that Germany does.

GE Hitachi has not even started pre-application filling talks with the ONR (Office of Nuclear Regulations). And that won't happen as long as there is no sponsor to actually construct one of those in the UK.

The GE Hitachi offer to the UK's NDA (Nuclear Decommissioning Authority) is payment by results. There's no sponsor sought or required. GE Hitachi intend to put their money where their mouth is - no successful removal of the proliferation threat - no payment. As a UK citizen, it sounds to me like one of the best energy deals we have ever been offered and, politically, it's a no brainer decision and a vote winner.

(if people would be willing to accept it, which is mostly an education issue).

Indeed. As focused as people (as a whole) seem to be with the current generation (i.e. unwillingness to conserve now to provide for future generations), I'm surprised so very few people, relatively, are concerned about coal plants in their back yards. You don't see all that many people petitioning as loudly as the anti-nuclear crowd against coal plants (mercury, CO2, etc.) or even natural gas plants (CO2). I guess it's fine if it slowly kills you, it's that rapidly killing stuff that we don't like.

Nuclear is safe as houses by comparison. BTW, before you trot out the various spills that have occurred, reflect on the hundreds of megatons of above ground nuclear detonation between 1945 and the early 60s. Somehow we're all still here...

To add to this, if a coal power plant had to follow the same regulations for nuclear emissions that a nuclear power plant does, it couldn't be licensed to operate in the U.S. So there's that to consider, plus all of the other crap that gets spewed out by a fossil fuel plant. There is a coal plant less than 10 miles from where I am sitting and another one further down the road and I would replace both of them in a heartbeat with a next-gen nuclear plant design if I could.

Also, I see a lot of people talking about the cost of waste disposal. Do those arguments take into account the $25 billion of untapped money in the Nuclear Waste Fund that every nuclear utility in the U.S. has been paying into since 1982? Right now it's all tied up by Congress while they fight over Yucca mountain or whatever else but it's not like nuclear utilities are just throwing spent fuel out the backdoor like "here guys, have fun!"

Also, I've posted it before but I'll throw in another vote for LFTR. I'm really excited about that technology and I wish Flibe Energy and the other developers the best of luck. There's also been talk of taking the current enriched uranium solid fuel designs and replacing water with molten salts as the primary coolant. This would help out a lot with safety and could have an easier path to regulatory approval due to the similarity with current solid-fuel LWRs. Also, the materials research and designs for things like pumps and heat exchangers and welds developed for those designs would transfer over to pebble and liquid fuel designs as well. It sounds like a good transition technologies and there is an active effort at ORNL for it now. There's a great 2hr or so video on YouTube where some thorium advocates tour ORNL and some of the people there talk at length about molten salt designs and the engineering and political challenges.

To add to this, if a coal power plant had to follow the same regulations for nuclear emissions that a nuclear power plant does, it couldn't be licensed to operate in the U.S. So there's that to consider, plus all of the other crap that gets spewed out by a fossil fuel plant. There is a coal plant less than 10 miles from where I am sitting and another one further down the road and I would replace both of them in a heartbeat with a next-gen nuclear plant design if I could.